Finding love and forming relationships are, and have always been, essential ingredients to the fabric of human culture. Those people in relationships or in love are trying to maintain those feelings and associations and those persons not in relationships or in love are attempting to find or form the same. As primarily used herein, “relationships” generally refer to social relationships but shall not necessarily be so limited. For many persons attempting to find love and form relationships, the process can be time consuming, stressful, somewhat confusing, and even daunting at times. Many people are unaware, or bashful, of how to initiate conversations concerning their and others' relationship status. Many people also find it problematic to notify others of a change to, or to update, their relationship status, especially to the public at large. It is also well known that many people desire to see what another person looks like before they engage in conversations that may lead to a potential relationship.
Many people turn to public dating websites and networking groups to help find a relationship and initiate conversations with other people. These websites and groups, however, often take a considerable amount of time to register and navigate through. As most of these websites and networking groups are based on complex integrated relationship parameters used to match and find “compatible” people for the user, they require significant amounts of personal information that many people find too intrusive. These websites and groups also generally require membership fees or operational costs that many users find undesirable. Also particularly disadvantageous to the user is the fact that your relationship status is only relayed to those other members of the website or networking group, such that the sample size of the public-at-large is minimal. As such, a user is unable to transfer and display their image, in addition their personal status, to a larger percentage of the viewing public.
Some known methods and applications utilize a combination of shapes, shape outlines, and colors to indicate a user's desired relationship status, sexual orientation, or other interests. These shapes are cascaded over one another to represent the multiple attributes of a user. The combination of these shapes form a “tag” that has a plurality of various combinations and components dependent on the user's characteristics and attributes. These methods are particularly disadvantageous as they are combined and do not allow it to be used in combination with an image of the user. Further, the multiple shapes, colors, and shape outlines require a member of the viewing public to remember and ascertain which component of the tag represents a user's relationship status. Moreover, these methods are also limited to its application on physical objects, e.g., clothing, bumper stickers, suitcases, such that they are not adaptable to be used on all social media accounts or displayed and communicated electronically over the interne.
Some other known methods employ portions of a social media page to display the user's relationship status. These methods suffer from many of the above-described disadvantages, in addition to requiring many of those members of the viewing public to also subscribe to the social media account before being able to view the user's relationship status. Moreover, these methods do not permit a member of the public to view an image of the user while simultaneously ascertaining the user's relationship status. Moreover, if the user experiences a relationship or emotional status change, the user is required to update all accounts or webpages.
Other known methods have attempted to effectively relay and notify the viewing public of a user's relationship status and change thereof, but they too have fallen short of a time- and cost-effective approach that has broad application. One known method requires a user to login to a server that is operable to access all of a user's social media accounts and update a user's relationship status. This method, however, is limited to only those social media accounts which the user preregisters with and is not compatible with all social media accounts or servers. The viewing public also has to navigate to the particular section of the social media web page that displays the user's relationship status and in some instances requires each member of the viewing public to have access to the user's relationship status. This method also does not permit a member of the viewing public to view an image of the user simultaneously with the user's relationship status.
Some other known methods utilize “tags,” or manually inserted descriptions, in combination with a photo or a user's image. For example, one known method attaches the name of a user represented in a photo and, when a member of the viewing public scrolls over the image of the user, his or her name appears. These tagging methods are disfavored by many users as the tags do not instantaneously relay a user's relationship status. They are also generally limited to the infrastructure of the software employed to implement the social media webpage and therefore are unable to be used on different social media accounts or unable to be utilized outside of the context of the social media account. As such, these methods have limited versatility and use in their application. In addition, these tagging methods are also generally incapable of being used with some operating systems, specifically those mobile applications and systems that do not incorporate the ability for the member of the viewing public to operate a cursor.
Therefore, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.